The Supreme Court has not addressed the relationship between searches by school administrators and a student’s Fourth Amendment rights in over two decades. Since then, remote learning and other advances in educational technology have changed the meaning of the “school environment.” In a recent federal district court case in Ohio, the court held that a public university’s remote examination policy, which required a student to conduct a scan of her own bedroom before beginning a remote exam, violated the student’s Fourth Amendment rights. This Comment argues that the previous school search Supreme Court cases offer poor tests for this new generation of school searches, and it propose a new framework based on other seminal Fourth Amendment cases in analogous contexts.
Executive Editor, Volume 172, University of Pennsylvania Law Review. J.D. Candidate, 2024, University of Pennsylvania; A.B., Middlebury College, 2018. I am indebted to Professor David Rudovsky and the editors of the University of Pennsylvania Law Review for their invaluable feedback on this project. I am also grateful to Jacob Grover, Caroline Ribet, and Nabil Shaikh for their friendship and guidance, and to Peter Elkind, Jason Chaskin, and Simon Stracher for their thoughts on earlier drafts. Finally, I owe many thanks to Addie Fishstein for her unwavering support throughout my time in law school.